


Safe Camp--Don’t Give Up--Go This Way

by scioscribe



Category: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Genre: Camping, First Kiss, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23723071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Ray.”  McVries was more awake now, but he hadn’t shaken off Garraty’s hand.  “What do they mean?”“They’re old hobo signs.”  He made himself swallow.  “From back when guys used to ride the rails.  But these ones are new.”  He rubbed his fingers together, feeling the stick-and-pull of the sap against his skin.
Relationships: Ray Garraty/Peter McVries
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40
Collections: Flash In The Pan: A Food Flash Exchange





	Safe Camp--Don’t Give Up--Go This Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> Hobo sign illustrations can be found [here.](http://www.angelfire.com/folk/famoustramp/signs.html)

“Holy God,” Garraty said hoarsely.

He’d stopped all at once, and McVries had walked straight into him; they’d both been doing the zombie shuffle for so long that their legs kept carrying them forward even when they didn’t want them to. Everything was slow to respond, like they were cars with spongy brake lines. McVries leaned against him, canted forward, blinking owlishly in Garraty’s peripheral vision.

“What is it?” He sounded half-asleep.

Garraty grabbed at him, trying for McVries’s arm and catching his wrist instead: it was a touch that slid down too easily to Pete’s hand. They were there holding onto each other like Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch’s candy house. At this point, even if there was a witch at the end of all this, Garraty would crawl headfirst into her oven if she’d let him break off a gingerbread shutter first. His stomach had gone as slack and used-up as his legs.

But what he was looking at was hope—the first hope he’d felt in days.

He touched the slash marks on the tree. The sap was still running, and the wood was sticky to the touch.

An X with a bar stretched across the top and what looked like a set of eyes, one to either side of the X’s cross.

On the tree next to it, two circles touching at their centers.

Just beyond that, a circle with a line sticking out of it.

“Ray.” McVries was more awake now, but he hadn’t shaken off Garraty’s hand. “What do they mean?”

“They’re old hobo signs.” He made himself swallow. “From back when guys used to ride the rails. But these ones are new.” He rubbed his fingers together, feeling the stick-and-pull of the sap against his skin. They’d covered the history of the First Great Depression back in sophomore year, and they’d spent two whole weeks on it. It was supposed to remind them all of how fast a downturn could come, how they needed the Major to protect them from all that, but in the middle of all of it the teacher had given them all mimeographed copies of the symbols hobos had used to talk to each other, and that hadn’t felt like it’d had anything to do with the Major at all. Only the Squads were supposed to have codes like that.

His teacher had shown him the book she’d copied the pictures from, and it had been old, its spine half-eaten away by mildew.

“Do you understand, Ray?” she had said calmly, and even though he hadn’t, he’d nodded.

He must have had WALKER stamped on his forehead even back then.

Maybe, he thought, he just hadn't looked too bright. But he’d remembered these.

He pointed them out, reading them nearest to farthest: “Safe camp. Don’t give up. Go this way.”

McVries did let go of him then, but only so he could step up and touch the fresh-running sap himself. “Somebody make these for you, Ray?” he was lightly.

“Maybe.” But he had to be realistic, even though he could hear the wheedling in his voice, could hear how badly he wanted Pete to believe. “It could be a trap, though.”

They couldn’t know how closely they were being hunted. They could have statewide roadblocks for him and Pete and a bounty on their heads that would have every hunter in the woods creaming his jeans, or they could have decided—it seemed just as possible, at least to Garraty’s exhaustion-raddled mind—to just let them go. It would save money, wouldn’t it? They couldn’t ever come out again where anyone could see them, and maybe that was supposed to be good enough. If they ever showed their faces, if they ever got recognized, they’d be dead, plain and simple. Everyone hated cheaters.

So maybe the Major had to decided to let them go. Or maybe, as some fucked-up matter of principle, he’d pried into Garraty’s school records and sent in men to carve symbols into the damn trees.

Anything was possible. Nothing was stranger than the Walk and what it did to you.

They were the ones who’d decided they’d keep going; they weren’t just going to die like the Walk wanted.

“I’ll take a trap if it’ll let me sit down,” Garraty said.

“And eat. Maybe the mouse can get a bite of the cheese even after the trap snaps down.” He sounded cheerful enough, but his walk, as they both started walking again, was as limping and pained as ever.

Like he was the Little Mermaid, Garraty thought a little dizzily, and he was walking on knives.

He knew he had to be moving the same way, but his own feet didn’t hurt him the same way it hurt him to see McVries like that.

There were three more arrow-trees, each one bending their course a little more, until they finally came to a clearing.

But there was nothing there. Garraty kept looking around like he thought there was a house he was missing, like it would shrug off its camouflage at any second.

Then again, all the signs had promised them was a safe _camp_ , and maybe this clearing was that. A house would sure as hell be more noticeable than a clearing, anyway: anyone looking for them would zero on a cabin. A camp—that would be safer, and maybe that was what this was. He had enough hope to get him through another minute of nothing, anyway, and then maybe he’d just sit down and let the grass eventually grow over and cover him up. It sounded peaceful. But not yet—not with Pete right there, not with Garraty being the reason they’d come this way.

“Hold on,” he said, and he knelt down. His knees let off dry snapping sounds that came with enough hot pain that it was like fireworks going off in his joints. He brushed at some of the leaves on the ground.

Beneath them, there were potatoes. Potatoes and a couple of big yellow onions.

McVries turned to peer over his shoulder and then clutched at him. His smile was too big for his thin face. “Ray, I could kiss you.”

“Not after you eat these onions you couldn’t,” Garraty said. He felt like he was dissolving into laughter. He was maybe on the border of some kind of hysteria, and he didn’t even care. “Let’s check all the leaf piles.”

They weren’t huge heaps—they wouldn’t have been conspicuous if you hadn’t thought about it being strange to see so many leaves on the ground in the middle of summer. They were just enough to hide what was underneath them.

Cans of food: corn and beans and and crushed tomatoes and peaches in heavy syrup. A loaf of store-bought bread in its plastic bag decorated with a little cartoon piece of toast: _EAT FORTIFIED BREAD AND **GROW STRONG**_. Dried jerky and leathery strips of dried fruit in sandwich bags: Garraty thought those last might be apricots, but he wasn’t sure. Big bars of milk chocolate, squashy from the heat. Gallon jugs of water—these were half-buried in the ground and had to be dug up. A pot, a big skillet, and a fire-starting kit. A few rolled up fleece blankets and some sweatshirts and plastic tarps. Two big, heavy Swiss Army knives.

Somebody out there gave a damn what happened to them.

Garraty wondered how many of these little caches had gotten hidden in the Maine woods over the last few days. How many symbols had gotten carved into trees and fenceposts on the off chance that he’d see them and remember what they meant.

Two of everything. They’d guessed that he and Pete would stick together.

Garraty realized he was crying, and he sucked in a deep breath, wiping his hands underneath his eyes. “What do you want for supper?”

McVries was rubbing at his eyes too. “Anything and everything.”

“Sit down, I’ll get it.” He felt inexpressibly tender towards McVries. “I can cook, anyway.”

“You’re a wonder among wonders, Garraty.”

Sometimes the way McVries looked at him, especially over the last few days, made Garraty feel like he was balanced on the edge of a knife and dizzy with it. He was going to make some kind of mistake with McVries if he wasn’t careful. It was something deeper than the buzzing in his skin he’d felt when Jan had first looked at him: this went all the way down to his bones. He noticed too much, with Pete. He looked at the wrong things, like the the bright strawberry McVries’s face turned when he was flushed, like the length of McVries’s fingers. They’d been sleeping spoons these last nights and waking up awkward, rolling away from each other, pretending they hadn’t noticed the hard-ons jutting up against their jeans. But whatever Garraty pretended, he _had_ noticed—and he’d thought about it. He’d noticed and thought about all of it. He just didn’t know what to think, and he knew even less about what to do.

But he did, like he’d said, know how to cook. So he started to it, letting himself be distracted by the familiar rhythms of his hands. Maybe he’d never done just this in just this spot with just these tools, but it was all close enough.

He splashed the tiniest bit of water on the potatoes to rub off the dirt and then clumsily peeled them. He wasn’t too good with the Swiss Army knife, and he kept taking off bits of potato along with peel. The end result was four pockmarked potatoes, skinless and yellow-white like candles, catching the last of the failing light. There was a rustle behind him, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw McVries gathering kindling and piling it up.

“All right, Ray?” McVries said quietly, when he saw Garraty looking.

He nodded. “Thanks.”

“Boys discover fire,” McVries muttered, sitting down cross-legged in front of the pile of sticks and tinder.

Garraty smiled and went back to the food. McVries could rediscover fire; Garraty would rediscover supper, something that wasn’t tubes of cheese and peanut butter or plucked red berries that made their stomachs cramp up. He diced the potatoes and threw them in the skillet. No oil or anything, so they’d scorch, but who gave a damn? He had the feeling this was still going to be the best meal they’d ever had in their lives. He put a chip of cold raw potato in his mouth, and even though it felt like eating Styrofoam, it took everything he had not to cut off another slice.

He chopped onions, blinking off the tears, and tossed them in with the potatoes. Drained some of the juice off the canned navy beans: he could cook those in the can and save the pot for later.

It occurred to him that they’d actually have to do dishes, sort of, and he had to bite down hard on his lip to keep from the kind of laugh that would have spooked the birds. It would have sounded crazy, but then, he’d _gone_ crazy, and he was only just now coming back to sane.

He carried the skillet over to the fire, moving carefully so that the excess didn’t slosh over the side. He’d overfilled it, but they’d eat it all, he knew that. It was killing him just to have to leave it until it was cooked.

They didn’t have anything to stir it with besides the blade of the knife, which didn’t work too well. McVries finally rubbed a stick on his shirt and used that instead, poking at their camp hash until the last of the liquid cooked away and the potatoes and onions started to crisp. Then the smell was so good that they couldn’t wait any longer.

They ate with the skillet and a jug of water between them, burning their hands scooping the mess of potatoes and beans and onions out of the still-sizzling pan.

They didn’t stop eating long enough to talk, but McVries closed his eyes and moaned at the first bite.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had any oil or even any salt. The onions were blackened at the edges and mellowly sharp and slippery in the middle, and they added seasoning to the beans and potatoes. It was almost colorless, that was the only problem, Garraty reflected: the next time he did it, he’d add in some of the tomatoes or the corn. If it was safe to stay here, they could learn how to hunt, and soon there’d be rabbit stew—there’d be fish—

“It could be good here, Pete,” he said recklessly. Maybe it was foolish to believe they could have that kind of mountain-men future, but he couldn’t unthink it: the stars were bright, the smoke from the fire was sweet, and his belly was full for the first time in what felt like eternity.

He went and got the bread, taking out a slice and offering one to McVries so they could mop up the last of the juice still clinging to their plates and hands. The bread was brown and studded with extra grains, and it had a warm, nutty flavor.

“I could teach you the hobo signs I remember,” he went on. “Maybe whoever stocked this place up—we could talk to them, sort of, and—”

McVries kissed him.

Their lips were cracked, and it almost hurt to press them together, but by now he was used to ignoring pain, and this was nothing. Garraty closed his eyes and leaned in. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears.

It wasn’t until he put his hand down on the rim of his plate that he realized what they were doing. The plate tilted up and then thumped down, and the noise was like someone clearing their throat. It made McVries stop; it made the whole thing be over.

The fire was shifting around the warmth on his body, turning different parts of him too hot at different times. He didn’t know what to say. _Touch me_ or _don’t do that_ or _let me take care of you._

No, he didn’t want to tell McVries not to touch him. Whatever he wanted, he didn’t want that.

“Why now?” he said. They both knew, didn’t they, that it was always going to happen sometime, but why tonight?

McVries shrugged and looked away. “It’s your paradise. All of this—nobody made it for me.”

“There’s two of everything—”

“They counted me in, but the signs were for you. You’re still Maine’s Own.”

“So?”

“So if I’m just going to wind up leaving, I thought it might as well be tonight. Before I get used to this.” He tilted his head back, staring up at the stars. “Not that I’m not already used to you, Ray. As Garraty goes, so goes my nation.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” Garraty said quietly.

And he didn’t want McVries to think this was another scar, something twisted into his flesh, something Garraty might want to look away from. It was theirs. He had just as much to do with it as McVries did.

He put his hand on McVries’s chin and turned McVries’s face towards him. It was hard—he almost didn’t know how to do it—but he got himself to kiss Pete on the mouth, the way Pete had done with him, and then everything else was easy. They hadn’t had a lot of easy, but this was. They kissed and then they opened a can of peaches and split one of the chocolate bars. At last they were slowing down, enjoying the sweetness.

“Show me another hobo sign,” McVries said. “O great rider of the railroads.”

Garraty drew in the dirt around the fire, sketching with one fingertip. He drew a cartoon cat.

“Cat? They used to warn about _cats_? What the hell could the cats do to them?”

“It meant there was a nice woman up ahead,” Garraty said. "Maybe it was a pussy joke."

“Your hoboes had dirty minds, Ray.” He elbowed him. “Draw the safe camp one again.”

He’d never seen McVries look so relaxed. In the firelight, his face was the same sweet, deep gold as the peaches.

Garraty drew the safe camp sign again. “Home sweet home.” He let himself lean against McVries, and they held each other up in the dark until they decided to lie down.


End file.
